The Gay Problem

Police in Malawi have launched an operation to hunt down and arrest high-profile gays and lesbians in the southern African state.

Fears of an anti-gay backlash across Africa are intensifying after the prosecution of the first gay couple to seek marriage in Malawi, and thousands of Ugandans demonstrated this week in support of a bill proposing the death penalty for some offences involving homosexual acts. Last week five men were arrested at an alleged gay wedding in Kenya.

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Campaigners in Malawi say homophobic legislation is driving gays and lesbians underground, making them hard to reach with information that could protect them from Aids.”In Malawi it’s a complete witch-hunt that denies the people the right to self-determination,” said Phumi Mtetwa, executive director of the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project, based in South Africa. “We are deeply concerned about this spate of homophobia across the continent.”

Mtetwa said the recent series of incidents was no accident but rather the work of US evangelical Christian groups. “It’s very well calculated. It’s exploding at the moment but it’s been happening for a year and a half. We have proof of American evangelical churches driving the religious fundamentalism in Uganda.”

The end of the article might make Mtetwa blush a little:

Gay sex is illegal in 36 countries in Africa. Only South Africa has legalised same sex marriage, and even there campaigners say the fight against bigotry is far from over.

A lot of Obama/Yes-on-8 voters? The Associated Press exit polls show that African Americans and Latinos backed Proposition 8 in good numbers. Details here from AP:

California’s black and Latino voters, who turned out in droves for Barack Obama, also provided key support in favor of the state’s same-sex marriage ban. Seven in 10 black voters backed a successful ballot measure to overturn the California Supreme Court’s May decision allowing same-sex marriage, according to exit polls for The Associated Press.

This makes Democracy look less like “Progress” and more like cultural crowd-sourcing, which Progressives (Whigs) have been critical of for some time. Cultural crowd-sourcing resulted in murdering women in colonial times, murdering Jews in Germany, murdering the aristocracy in Russia, and now murdering gays in Africa.

When thinking about Democracy we should remember that not every culture crowd-sources its beliefs in a “Progressive” way. Crowd-sourcing is often very conservative, as in the case of Prop 8 or the Arizona immigration law. Sometimes Democracy simply produces the average sentiment, which can be anywhere between murderous and virtuous. This doesn’t mean Democracy is good or bad, it just means Democracy makes local sentiment into law, even if it’s a very inefficient, or “bad”, law.